These days, we are treated to glorious images of the cosmos through astrophotography and sophisticated three-dimensional visualizations of the universe. In the early centuries of astronomy, however, ...

Far beyond Neptune, at the far outer rim of our Solar System, astronomers have spotted what looks like a hidden “structure” ...

Astronomers might have found evidence of a structure located farbeyond Neptune, potentially giving us clues about the solar system’s primordial past. This discovery involves a dense concentration of ...

The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, serving as the final boundary between us and the dark reaches of interstellar ...

An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. The Oort Cloud, a large expanse of icy bodies revolving around the sun at a distance ...

The exact shape of the Oort cloud and how it is affected by forces beyond our solar system have, so far, remained mysterious. Now, researchers have developed a new model that suggests the inner ...

This story appears in the July 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron microscope ...